Homing (24 page)

Not for the first time since noon Virginia put both hands to her eyes and allowed a long shudder to run through her. Suppose I had had to tell Jeff that Mab had been shot to death in our own wood, she thought. Jeff—not Irene. Unreasonably she had thought first of Jeff in reckoning up the aftermath of Mab’s adventure. All very well to say, with hindsight, that the German would not have wanted to call attention to himself by firing a gun. He carried a gun in a shoulder holster, and there was no telling what he might have done if his right arm had not been disabled, making a difficult draw. Mab had not thought of that, when she swung the tennis racquet at his head. Must I keep her always with me now, Virgina thought wearily, for the impulse was never to let Mab out of her sight again. So much for taking no notice of Hitler and going on just as usual. It wasn’t enough to watch for parachutes, neither of these Germans had used one. From now on, Germans could be anywhere. Virginia herself always
supervised
the locking up each night. Glass doors into the garden were not much use, she thought as she got into bed.

She had no sooner begun to drop off than she was roused again by the ringing of her bedside telephone.

“Westley here,” a calm voice said. “The word has gone out. Have everybody get dressed and be prepared.”

“You d-don’t mean inv—”

The line clicked and he was gone.

Outwardly composed, inwardly what she would have called twittering, Virginia went round knocking on doors, saying the same thing to each startled question from within, moving on before more questions could detain her: “Get dressed and come downstairs. There’s some kind of alert on.”

Only one reply made any real impression on her mind.

“Oh, dear,” said Melchett, without any fuss. “I’d better make some tea.”

Virginia had left Mab till the last. She opened the door quietly and went in. Mab was reading in bed, with the
blackout
curtains still drawn. Noel, who had somehow stolen a lot of the limelight and after being regarded all his life as rather timid and too highly strung had now proved himself a mass of leonine courage, lay on the coverlet guarding her feet—which was not as a rule allowed. When Virginia appeared he rolled his eyes at her warily without moving, his chin comfortably pillowed on Mab’s ankles. Somewhat to his surprise, no one ordered him down.

“We’re supposed to get dressed,” Virginia said, as though it was 8 am of an ordinary morning. “I’ve just had a phone call from Captain Westley. Some kind of general alarm has gone out.”

Mab felt again that trickle of ice through her veins—more Germans—able-bodied ones, capable of shooting a small black dog that barked. And Noel would bark now, every time he saw a German uniform. She reached for him and pulled him along the coverlet into her arms, as Virginia said, “Darling, you must jump into some clothes at once.”

“Listen!”
said Mab, sitting rigid with Noel in her arms.

The churchbells—silent since mid-June all over England in order that their ringing might be the signal that invasion had begun—the churchbells in the village were ringing.

“
They’ve
come!
”
gasped Mab, and swung out of bed, grabbing for her slippers.

Virginia went to the wardrobe and chose warm clothes, though the night was mild—a tweed skirt, a woollen jumper—and tossed them at Mab.

“Get into those quickly and come along to my room.”

Outside Mab’s door, she ran. By the time Mab joined her, clothed and composed and very white, with Noel on a leash he seldom wore, Virginia was ready too. She had even put on lipstick.

Together they descended to the drawing room where the others were assembling. With the lights on, inside the blackout, almost in silence they waited.

Melchett brought in a tea tray, exactly as though it was the usual time of day for tea, and as she set it down a car drew up outside and there was a certain amount of tramping about, and the knocker on the front door banged three times.

Nobody in the room said anything. Virginia followed Melchett into the hall.

“Ask who it is before you open the door,” she whispered, and waited just inside the curtain which masked the shaded light in the hall from the steps when the door was open.

“Westley of the Home Guard!” rang through the oak panels, and Melchett snatched open the door and he came round the curtain—an elderly, competent man who was somehow able to impart smartness even to that rough uniform with the Mons ribbon on its tunic, blinking a little even in the dim hall, a rifle in his hands—and Virginia could have kissed him for not being a German. Instead, she said, “Good evening, Captain Westley. What now?”

“Apparently they’re here,” he announced gently. “
Somewhere
. Anyway, the password for invasion has been phoned in, and everyone is standing to. You’ll be all right, of course, except for parachutists. I want to leave a man here on your telephone, and two outside, so some one will have to stand by on this door. I should make ready if I were you.”

“Ready for what? We’re not supposed to move.”

“No question of moving. But don’t anybody go back to bed. Stay all together, I would. You know the rules—bicycles—maps—petrol?”

She shook her head.

“Kept locked up and hidden. There’s a bit of food available, of course—”

“Can’t do much about what’s in the larder now. Besides—you’re a household of women. No heroics, mind—use common sense.”

He stepped round the curtain to
the door, and she heard his lowered voice outside. Following him to the steps, she made out a small force of men in the Home Guard uniform, a car, a couple of motorcycles, and what appeared to be a Bren gun. A lad with a rifle passed her and was shown the telephone by Melchett, took possession of it and at once began a cryptic conversation with some one he called Fred.

“It sounds awfully silly,” said Virginia, standing on the top step beside Westley in the dark. “But would anybody like some refreshment while you’re here?”

“Later, if we don’t have too much company,” he said. “Thanks very much.”

He got into the car and it moved away, followed by the
motorcycles
and the gun.

That sounded as though he might be back. Virginia returned
to the drawing room, unreasonably comforted. There were men about the house.

Mab was sitting on the sofa drinking tea, with Noel lying at her feet. She found it hard to swallow, and the sweet biscuits hastily provided by Melchett were beyond her, but she managed to sip the tea. Everyone looked at Virginia in well-behaved silence as she came in.

“The Guard is here,” she said, going to the tray to fill her own cup. “One of them will be on the telephone and two
outside
. Captain Westley again, God bless him.”

“Have they landed?” Mab asked, for somebody had to.

“He doesn’t know. The code signal for invasion has been sent out. Now we just have to wait.”

They waited all night. Sometimes the telephone in the hall rang, and the lad posted there talked into it. But nothing else happened.

Some of the girls went to sleep on the chairs and sofas where they sat. Some of them smoked endlessly, some tried to knit or read. Putting on the gramophone would drown outside sounds, and everyone wanted to listen—for what? At dawn the birds began.

Mab had brought her knitting to Virginia’s side, and found she could not guide the needles for trembling, which shamed her, and she pretended to doze, leaning against Virginia’s shoulder. With her eyes closed she visualized Jeff’s half-crown on the mantelpiece. He had already won it once today, when she managed not to go to pieces in the wood. Whatever he had bet on had worked and she had even surprised herself, as he had prophesied.

But now was the second time round. If she did anything wrong now he could still lose it. And this was worse, this time you had time to think, and imagine things. If there was a parachute drop nearby and the men outside the house were killed, the man on the telephone might still have time to give the alarm, she thought. To whom? And if before Captain Westley could get back to the house the Germans actually entered it, what would they do to its occupants? In Holland they had smashed things, set
booby traps,
used civilians as shields, shot people who resisted. If Noel barked, and he would—if Virginia talked back to them, and she would….

If ever you have hysterics, I lose, Jeff had said when he laid down the half-crown. Tense and silent, her eyes closed, she
waited—while her right hand crept towards her left wrist, which was encircled by the bracelet of Jeff’s birthday watch, and fastened hard around it, pressing it down against the bone. She tried to remember the touch of his hands the day he put it on for her—and then recalled the evening since then when she had obeyed the recurrent impulse to lay her lips against his quiet fingers. He was not surprised when she did that, she recalled now. He accepted the gesture as not unexpected—almost as though she had done it before….

She contemplated again her own words that evening. Well, anyone could quote the Psalms at need—but she had called it, half apologetically, a charm, perhaps because although they attended the village church nearly every Sunday and had the Vicar to dinner every so often, they were not a noticeably religious family, and suddenly to say something from the Bible, out loud, in the drawing room, sounded to her own ears a little queer—
almost
as
though
some
one
else
had
spoken
for
her
….

Sitting very still against Virginia’s shoulder, clasping her left wrist with her right hand, Mab pursued this new and perilous line of thought. I was born loving you, she had said to him, without thinking twice about it then or since, and he had not been surprised at that either—
as
though
Jeff
knew.
Well, Jeff always knew things. But why did he look like that—as though he was sorry for her. Not just because there was nothing they could do about it, he wasn’t meant to do anything about it, that was what she had tried to tell him. Not just because she could never marry anyone else, for love of him. Jeff’s compassion was greater than that—as though—her mind groped forward into the mystery—as though Jeff knew something he kept from her—as though he spared her some knowledge she had not yet attained—as though there was something
beyond
….

At breakfast time, when they had opened the curtains and washed their faces and tried to behave like a normal Sunday morning, the car returned, bringing Captain Westley. He came into the hall, brisk and smiling and apparently as fresh as a daisy, and leaned his rifle against the table by the telephone as Virginia went to meet him.

“I think it’s a dud,” he said. “Would you run to a cup of tea now?”

Virginia, who had already supplied the men on duty with food and tea, drew him into the dining room where tired, welcoming faces awaited him. And somehow the meal became quite a merry one.

By the time they knew that the invasion had not happened after all, they knew that London had had the worst raid of the war, and that another was already beginning.

So Hitler’s secret weapon was fairly simple after all. It consisted of dumping everything he could lay hands on—screaming bombs, oil bombs, delayed action, incendiary, and land mines—over London. He kept it up for fifty-seven days and nights. And on November third, when for the first time there was no alert, London was still there.

So was the family, at its respective posts—thin, worn, sleepless, but holding up. Stephen’s mobile canteen had finally arrived from America, and he had left the concert parties to drive it himself nearly every night, where the fires were hottest. The girls would not give in and go to the country even for a breather. Everyone had adjusted with enormous effort to not ringing up everybody every day to make sure they were all right.

Of them all, Sylvia was showing the least strain, and could least have explained it. It was not that she had been let off all contact with human misery and grief, for the search for pets among the ruins was usually accompanied by heartbreaking scenes, working side by side with the wardens and rescue squads, in the effort to save some beloved animal whose owner desperately needed the solace of its continued existence. “Could you please come round to Number 81, miss, they won’t let me pass the barrier, and me pore cats is in there somewhere—” And there would be a discussion with the warden or constable on duty and some kind of compromise, and perhaps a long, perilous crawl through jackstraw timbers and a powder of plaster dust, dragging the canvas bag into which one must thrust a clawing, terrified, probably bleeding pussy and drag it out again—tears of gratitude, First Aid at the post, a cup of milk for its supper—and on to the sombre duty of explaining to a quivering child that the limp dog it carried had gone to heaven….

But during the past two months Sylvia had come to terms with her war, in a mysterious inner serenity which was unaccountable even to herself. I thought I was a coward, she would think, in the midst of inferno. Well, I am, of course, down inside. But I didn’t know it wouldn’t matter. I didn’t know you could go on anyhow. It’s as though some one else took charge and you just
obeyed orders. Very convenient, Sylvia thought. And she went on living every day as though it was the only one she had and if it was the last—they had all been good. Midge the canary saw it through with her, going down to the shelter with Dinah if Sylvia was not there to escort him, singing foolishly as the gunfire grew louder—imitation thunder, usually of an inferior quality—brash and gay and healthy and unaware. Each time she thought of evacuating him to Farthingale she thought how insulted he would be if allowed to decide for himself—and so he remained in the Upper Brook Street house, living his life as he saw it, yiking with joy each time she returned to him, maintaining in his fragile olive-yellow body an essential part of her own secret morale.

“One more for Midge,” she would tell herself firmly, even when it was cats. One more of the speechless ones, and nobody understood better than Sylvia what they meant to the dazed, lost, homeless humans who belonged to them. The house fell down, the possessions of a lifetime were dust, but if the warm, confiding body of the pet was restored to empty hands life could begin again, life could go on.